Chapter 144

Chapter 144: This Door Can’t Be Opened From This Side

Little Red Riding Hood looked in a great mood; if someone who knew her well saw her face right now, they would be shocked: [She had not relaxed like this in a long time.]

Still, she argued seriously with Yu Sheng: “My eighteenth birthday is next month. You can’t treat me like a kid.”

Yu Sheng raised a brow and said: “Anyone under eighteen is a kid. After you turn eighteen, I’ll treat you like an adult, and don’t forget to save me a piece of cake.”

The moment he finished, Foxy, who had been studying the Chickling, suddenly looked up and said: “Me too!”

It turned out that after all that talk between Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood, this fox girl only caught the key part.

Little Red Riding Hood laughed, her smile bright, then she bared her teeth at Yu Sheng and Foxy like a playful wolf pup and said: “Deal. Even if knives fall from the sky, you still have to come celebrate. Whoever doesn’t come is a puppy.”

Yu Sheng grinned, took out his phone, and filed a one-tap report, then he turned and casually pulled open a Door that led to the orphanage.

The shimmering, phantom Door opened without a sound, and on the other side was an empty corridor in the orphanage’s west wing.

Little Red Riding Hood walked to the edge of the platform and shouted to the two kids still playing on the grass, one big and one small: “Xiao Xiao! Rapunzel! Time to go home, it’ll be dark soon!”

Rapunzel brought Xiao Xiao back to the platform, but the little girl still looked around with reluctance.

The girl pouted and said: “I haven’t played enough. Can we come again next time?”

Yu Sheng nodded right away and said: “Of course. I can come visit you often. Maybe one day I can set a Door just for your orphanage.”

Rapunzel’s face turned a bit awkward as she said: “Well, no need to take it that seriously. That’s too much trouble.”

Yu Sheng answered calmly: “It’s not trouble. It’s my current research project. If your organization ever plans kids’ field trips or if the older Cursed Children have sketching outings, you can come to me. My valley doesn’t have much else, but it has plenty of space. The city parks can’t compare.”

Little Red Riding Hood thought it over and decided that putting “field trip” and “Otherworld” in the same sentence sounded a bit creepy, but she was already used to it.

The guests left.

Irene marched over, cheeks puffed in annoyance, and after smoothing her skirt she grabbed Yu Sheng’s pants and climbed up while grumbling: “I don’t like human cubs. They are so loud, always saying boring things and doing boring things. I don’t see what’s fun about chasing each other on the grass.”

Yu Sheng glanced at her perched on his shoulder and said with a smile: “But you looked pretty happy playing with that kid in the second half. And you have the nerve to call others noisy?”

Irene thought for a beat, then hugged Yu Sheng’s head and started gnawing on it, only for him to pry her off with one hand.

Dangling by her collar in midair, Irene asked casually: “What are we doing next? Going home? It’s not dinner time yet.”

Yu Sheng shook his head and said: “No rush. I still need to run some experiments, but I should call Bai Li Qing first.”

As he spoke, he took out his phone under Irene’s puzzled gaze, gathered his thoughts, and dialed the number he had been bothering a lot lately.

The call connected quickly. A calm voice said: “Hello? Yu Sheng?”

Yu Sheng cleared his throat and said: “Yeah, it’s me. Sorry, things are messy on my end today. I just remembered to call you.”

“No problem. What do you want to say?”

Her tone was very steady, as if she had already forgotten calling him a steel-faced stiff last time.

Yu Sheng said: “Two things. First, I told you I have something tomorrow that I want the Special Affairs Bureau to identify. One item is something I found in the Fairy Tale Black Forest. I also want to request some files about Fairy Tale.”

Bai Li Qing was silent for two seconds, then said: “You mean the archives from when the Special Affairs Bureau first centralized the early victims and explored the Fairy Tale Otherworld, right?”

Yu Sheng let out a breath and said: “You guessed it. That set of files from about seventy years ago.”

Bai Li Qing said calmly: “After I heard what you did today, I guessed it. I’m just curious why you suddenly got interested. Is it because of that Spirit Realm Detective named Little Red Riding Hood?”

Yu Sheng said: “She was the trigger, but the main reason is that I want to step in. I have a problem with this Otherworld. If I leave it alone, my thoughts won’t sit right. Is that reason good enough?”

Bai Li Qing answered at once: “Good enough. I’ll arrange it. Someone will pick you up tomorrow. The identification lab and the files will be ready before then.”

Yu Sheng had expected her to agree, but he didn’t expect it to be that fast. He froze for a second, then recovered and said: “Ah, thanks.”

Her voice stayed steady as she said: “Easy to do. What’s the second thing?”

Yu Sheng sounded a little embarrassed as he said: “The second thing isn’t hard, just annoying. I’m about to run some experiments.”

“Experiments?”

He said: “Door Opening experiments. I might run many, the methods may be new, the scale is hard to say, and the time is uncertain. I figure the one-tap report on my phone won’t be enough, better to call you.” [One-tap report won’t cut it.]

The other end went quiet.

Irene, now set down on the ground, muttered: “She’s cursing, cursing in her heart for sure.”

Bai Li Qing spoke again, still calm, though with Irene’s commentary buzzing, Yu Sheng felt like she was speaking through clenched teeth: “No problem. I’ll notify the Monitoring Unit to silence all automatic alarms and switch to manual logging. Call me when you’re done.”

The call ended. Yu Sheng lowered his head to look at the little doll standing with hands on her hips.

Irene said: “She definitely cursed. My spiritual intuition says so. So what are you going to test?”

Yu Sheng took a slow breath, lifted his hand, and said: “First, I’ll try to open a Door from the outside that leads into the Black Forest.”

A phantom Door took shape in his hand. The plain, glowing Door trembled in the air.

Yu Sheng narrowed his eyes, recalled the “frequency” he had recorded inside the Black Forest, laid it onto the Door, and carefully pulled the Door open.

In the next second, the Door shattered in silence.

Irene and Foxy both gasped softly at the same time.

A wave of vertigo hit hard. Yu Sheng grabbed his head and staggered back half a step.

Foxy rushed over and wrapped him with her tail as she said: “Benefactor, did your immortal art backfire?”

Yu Sheng steadied himself, felt the dizziness fade, and waved to Foxy and Irene as he said: “I’m fine. Just got dizzy. Door Opening failed. That’s a first.”

Irene stared and said, worried: “This can even fail? Are you sure you’re okay?”

Yu Sheng tugged a smile, slipped out of Foxy’s tail, exhaled, and frowned at the place where the Door had collapsed as he thought it over.

After a moment he murmured: “It shouldn’t be like this. You can open a Door from the Black Forest back to the outside. Why can’t you go from outside to the Black Forest?”

Irene muttered: “Because this Door can’t be opened from this side?”

Yu Sheng shivered and said: “Don’t say that. I’m allergic to that line.”

Foxy tried to reason it out as she said: “Maybe it’s because this valley is part of your cave residence. This isn’t normal reality. Would that affect it?”

Irene’s eyes lit up as she said: “Hey, silly fox, sometimes your brain does work.”

Yu Sheng nodded and said: “Foxy has a point. Let’s try it in the outside world.”

He opened a Door to a deserted alley near No. 66 Wutong Road.

A short while later, Yu Sheng sat woozy on the curb near his front door, seeing double power poles. Even the thin shadow by the pole seemed to have three heads.

It turned out the failure had nothing to do with being inside a special space. As long as you tried to open a Door from the outside directly into the Black Forest, you ran into the same problem.

They returned to the valley, discouraged.

Irene sat on Yu Sheng’s shoulder with her cheeks in her palms and said: “Looks like it really won’t work. You can open a Door to leave the Black Forest, but you can’t open one from the outside to enter it. If you want to go in, you have to take the dream path. I think that’s because the Black Forest is basically a space of consciousness. You can wake from a dream, but you can’t walk straight from the physical world into a dream. That would make no sense.”

Yu Sheng didn’t speak. He listened to Irene’s analysis while turning over similar ideas in his mind, but something still felt off. [This one-way rule, is it really just because it is a pure consciousness space?] If so, how did he bring out Wolf Granny, and what about that slip of paper?